The second movement is structured by the statement of a theme by the orchestra alone ; followed by five subsequent variations. The emotions experienced in the first movement are expanded in the second to include more darkness among the fun and light.
The movement begins in a slow, mysterious fashion, like a dark musical tunnel — one from which we emerge with playful musical clarity and increased energy in for the second and third variations. Thumping double basses emphasise rhythm. In this movement fast octave runs on the piano interweave with tense, exciting passages from the orchestra that occasionally veer into minor keys. The already-fast tempo switches gears into total allegro — everyone is on full throttle for a short while until it all slows right down, and moves into a slow, lyrical section, where the woodwinds pick up a descending melody, reminiscent of the first movement.
The piece eventually builds up again in volume and tempo to a thrilling finale that places us back in a major key — showcasing the incredible virtuosity of the composer and performer and ending with a feeling of uplift and pure positive energy. Symphony No. The first movement opens with a clarinet dutifully singing out the main theme under a bed of sweetly stinging strings.
This movement develops picks up pace, with idiosyncratic, tornadic flourishes and brassy military calls growing to an all-encompassing orchestral texture. A pupil of Gliere at 11, then Rimsky-Korsakov and Lyadov at 13, he inevitably developed an acute sense of colour and a strong feel for the lyrical line. So, whence came the mischievous streak that surfaced in the year old's First Piano Concerto , which so offended Glazunov?
Was it from Glazunov's own active encouragement of cultural cross-fertilisation with Western Europe? If so, it seems that Glazunov scalded his fingers on his own boiled fruit. The Second Concerto stands apart in its almost entirely pervasive, red-eyed rage. It incorporates not just grief over, but also anger at the wasteful loss of his great friend, Maximilian Schmidthof. The concerto went on the back burner for five years.
Never really playing his political cards, he managed to survive the incredibly difficult times during the s by adroit artistic gamesmanship with the harshly repressive Stalinist state. He never joined the Communist Party, and made few public statements.
He struggled to survive, maintain his artistic integrity and continue composing in an authentically personal style. But, alas, the difficulties of the extreme, repressive measures beginning in ultimately got the best of him. Prokofiev, in addition to his education as a composer, trained as a concert pianist, and early on began supplying himself with compositions. Among his early piano works he wrote two piano concertos—the first he played for his final student examinations at the St.
Petersburg Conservatory in He witnessed and supported the Revolution in , but it is noteworthy that in May he left Russia and the struggles of the proletariat, and travelled all the way across Russia through Siberia to Tokyo, and then on to New York.
You might say that he sneaked out the backdoor. The annals of Prokofieviana are filled with sketches for compositions that never reached completion. But Prokofiev was also a pragmatic composer, and rather than let perfectly good work go to waste he frequently recycled music intended for an unfinished project into one that held more promise. Such was the case with the Third Piano Concerto. He composed it mostly in , but he drew on quite a few scraps of music that had come into being earlier and been intended originally for other pieces.
It is famously difficult for the dexterity and stamina it requires of the soloist and, as a result, stands near the top of the list of ultra-virtuosic showpiece concertos. The first movement opens slowly, with the solo clarinet quickly joined in harmony by a second clarinet, then by violins and flute singing what sounds like a languorous Russian folk song although apparently it is not.
Still hushed, the music suddenly breaks into far faster tempo; after a few measures of rapid build-up played pizzicato by the strings, the piano enters with a sparkling melody of ringing authority. Once it enters, the piano will rarely be far from the fray, whether playing lightning-quick figuration or pounding emphatic chords, and much of the movement unrolls in the spirit of a perpetuum mobile.
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